in a collection edited by Harry T. Moore. Several of Lawrence’s fictional works—includingSons and Lovers, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love, and The Virgin and the Gipsy—have been adapted to the motion-picture medium, and his life is the subject of the 1981 film The Priest of Love.

The running battle against censorship in which D. H. Lawrence engaged throughout most of his career undoubtedly performed a valuable service to subsequent writers and the reading public, though it cost him dearly both emotionally and financially. The essentially symbolic role of sexuality in his writing resembles somewhat that found in Walt Whitman’s, but Lawrence’s more overt treatment of it—liberating as it was to a generation whose Victorian upbringing had been castigated by the Freudians—led to a general misunderstanding of his work that persisted for almost three decades after his death. The thirty-year suppression of Lady Chatterley’s Lover backfired, as censorship so often does, attracting the public’s attention to the object of the prohibition. Unfortunately this notoriety made the novel, far from Lawrence’s greatest, the one most commonly associated with his name in the popular mind. His reputation among more serious readers was not helped by the series of sensationalistic memoirs published by some of his more ardent followers in the 1930’s and early 1940’s. Championed as a prophet of free love and utopianism, repudiated as a crazed homosexual and protofascist, Lawrence the artist all but disappeared from view.

The appearance of several serious and sympathetic studies of Lawrence in the middle and late 1950’s, by presenting a more accurate record of his life and a more discriminating assessment of his work, largely succeeded in salvaging Lawrence’s stature as a major writer. Among those most responsible for the Lawrence revival were F. R. Leavis, Harry T. Moore, Edward Nehls, and Graham G. Hough. Subsequent readers have been able to recognize more readily in the best of Lawrence’s work what Leavis described as its “marked moral intensity,” its “reverent openness before life.”

In addition to his prophetic themes, Lawrence’s technical innovations are now acknowledged as among the most important in modern fiction. He could convey a “ripping yarn” and portray lifelike characters when he chose, and parts of Sons and Lovers and The Lost Girl, among many other works, demonstrate his mastery of traditional realism in the representation of his native Midlands. More fundamentally, however, Lawrence’s novels are triumphs of mood and sensibility; they seek (as Frank Kermode has said) less to represent life than to enact it. He has no peer in the evocative rendering of place, introducing poetic symbols that carry the meaning without losing sight of their basis in intensely observed, concrete details.

Lawrence’s approach to characterization following The Rainbow was unconventional in that he avoided “the old stable ego” and pattern-imposed character types in an effort to go beneath the rational and articulate levels of consciousness to the nonhuman being in his characters. As Walter Allen has observed, for Lawrence “the value of peopleconsisted in how far mystery resided in them, how far they were conscious of mystery.” The linear, cause-and-effect development of characters controlled by the rational intellect was for him a hindrance. He focused instead on the surging, dynamic forces—sexual impulses, the potency of nature and animals, the terrible allure of death—that in their purest form defy rationality and are communicated by a kind of unmediated intuition.

His prose style was similarly subjective in emphasis. The frequent repetitiveness and inflated rhetoric can be tiresome, but at its best the prose is supple and sensuous, its dynamic rhythms incantatory, a powerful vehicle of Lawrence’s vision. Further, he avoided the neat resolution of closure of traditionalnarratives, typically preferring the “open end” in which the vital forces operating in his characters are felt to be continuously and dynamically in process rather than subdued by the authorial imposition of finality. His comment on the bustling activities of Indian peasants on market day, in Mornings in Mexico, epitomizes his fictional method as well as his vitalist doctrine: “In everything, the shimmer of creation and never the finality of the created.”

Lawrence’s approach to fiction involved considerable risks, and many of his novels are seriously flawed. There are those who cannot read him at all. Nevertheless, the integrity of his vision and the sheer power with which he communicated it have made E. M. Forster’s estimate (written shortly after Lawrence’s death) stand up: “He was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation.”

D. H. Lawrence’s productions reflect his artistic range. Accompanying his considerable body of poetry, the eleven novels published during his lifetime include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). He wrote almost continuously for literary periodicals in addition to publishing five volumes of plays, nine volumes of essays, and several short-story collections including The Prussian Officer, and Other Stories (1914), England, My England (1922), and The Woman Who Rode Away, and Other Stories (1928). His final works, including Apocalypse and Etruscan Places, appeared between 1930 and 1933, and more poetry, essays, and drafts of fiction have since been collected in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936) and Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works (1968). Several of Lawrence’s works, as well as Harry Moore’s biography, The Priest of Love, have been adapted for the screen. The Phoenix Edition of D. H. Lawrence was published in 1957; Viking has printed The Complete Short Stories of D. H. Lawrence (1961) and The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence (1965).

D. H. Lawrence’s work has consistently appealed to the adventurous and the perceptive. Ford Madox Ford, editor of the progressive English Review, printed Lawrence’s earliest poems and short stories there in 1911, recognizing beneath their conventional surfaces potent psychological and emotional undercurrents previously unexplored in British letters. Before Freud’s theories were widely known, Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers daringly probed the dangerous multilayered mother-son-lover triangle he had experienced in his own life. After his elopement, itself a scandal, Lawrence produced The Rainbow, seized by Scotland Yard in 1915 and publicly condemned for obscenity. Lawrence’s subsequent self-exile from England and his growing artistic notoriety came to a climax in the censorship trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Behind the alleged pornography, however, critics soon grasped Lawrence’s genuine ability to convey whatT. S. Eliot called “fitful and profound insights” into human behavior. Lawrence’s admirers also included Edward Garnett, John Middleton Murry, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, and Rainer Maria Rilke, although Virginia Woolf perhaps illustrated her generation’s ambivalence toward Lawrence most pungently: “Mr. Lawrence has moments of greatness, but he has hours of something quite different.” Lawrence’s own critical studies, particularly his pseudonymous Movements in European History (1921), and Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), reveal a singular blend of historical perspective and instinctive understanding appreciated only after his death. Once the laudatory memories and abusive denunciations had died out, Lawrence’s artistic reputation grew steadily, attributed generally to the craftsmanship of his short fiction and the uncompromisingly honest investigations of sexuality in his novels. As readers young in spirit increasingly observe, however, Lawrence’s greatest gift, his affirmation of life, shines most brightly in his poetry.

How does D. H. Lawrence make his “problematic couples” happy?

As a critic, Lawrence expresses many of his literary convictions. Observe some of them in his book Studies in Classic American Literature.

Do we learn more about the Etruscan culture or about Lawrence in Etruscan Places?

Are Lawrence’s unsuccessful lovers primarily failures or victims of forces beyond their control?

Lawrence’s poetry often attempts to capture a revealing moment. How is this true of “Snake”?

What are the chief pitfalls of equating Paul Morel and his creator?